A personal injury lawyer specializing in beauty products and services is warning against cosmetic treatment she would no longer do because of the scary and “terrifying” side effect – which is far more common than it seems people understand.
Whitney Ray Di Bona, owner of Beauty Justice, LLC, spoke out against CoolSculpting, a popular procedure that can cause your body fat to grow into unsightly (but not cancerous) tumors.
Appearing on the Culture Apothecary podcast with Alex Clark, Di Bona had a clear response to the “fraud” of the medical spa industry that she would warn against.
“CoolSculpting is this machine that’s supposed to freeze your fat,” she explained.
Introduced in 2010, CoolSculpting is a cryolipolysis or fat freezing method that targets visible fat bulges in places like the stomach, thighs, arms and chin. It works by creating cold-induced apoptosis, or the death of fat cells, in specific areas.
If everything goes well, after a few treatments, the fat cells die and melt away. But sometimes, things go wrong.
“There’s a terrible side effect called paradoxical adipose hyperplasia, where instead of the fat cells shrinking, they actually expand and grow into a tumor,” Di Bona said.
Those non-cancerous “tumors” consist of large, hardened fat that sometimes grows in the shape of the CoolSculpting applicator. Distortion can develop almost immediately or up to six months after treatment and requires surgery to correct.
In 2022, supermodel Linda Evangelista came out with her paradoxical adipose hyperplasia (PAH) story, telling fans they hadn’t seen her in a long time because she had been hiding about it.
She wrote on Instagram that she was “brutally disfigured”, saying it “added, not reduced, my fat cells and left me permanently disfigured even after undergoing two painful, unsuccessful corrective surgeries.
“PAH has not only destroyed my livelihood, it has sent me into a cycle of deep depression, deep sadness and the lowest depths of self-loathing. In the process, I have become a loner,” she added.
Evangelista sued Zeltiq Aesthetics, a unit of Allergan Aesthetics, the makers of CoolSculpt, for $50 million, eventually settling for an undisclosed amount.
She is not the only one. The FDA saw a spike in reports after Evangelista’s lawsuit — 1,100 in 2021, more than in the previous 10 years combined. In 2022, there were 1,900 reports.
Actress Rae-Shan Barclift of East Orange, NJ, said she had a similar experience after spending $2,700 in one session for her stomach, waist and chin.
“CoolSculpting left me with something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy,” she said.
Di Bona, the beauty advocate, admits she did CoolSculpting herself a decade ago and remembers how every medical spa offered it back then — but she had no clear warning of what could go wrong.
“No one told me this was a possibility, and so many people who have had it say the same thing, like: No one warned me this was a side effect, no one told me this could happen,” she recalls.
What’s more, she said, the company behind CoolSculpting was “kind of hiding the numbers” on how common the side effect is. Allergan Aesthetics claimed that PAH occurred in only 0.033% of treatments, or about 1 in 3,000.
But a 2020 study said it is “likely to be underreported and misdiagnosed,” and the New York Times reported last year that the risk is much higher than CoolSculpting said, according to interviews with more than a dozen doctors.
They even cited a 2017 study in which doctors reported the side effect in 1 in every 100 patients.
CoolSculpting’s final warning is that rare side effects such as “visible enlargement in the treated area” may occur in 1 to 10 in 10,000 – and that’s the treatments, not the patients, so patients who go for multiple rounds increase their risk.
Di Bona says these numbers are too high, stating, “We’re not doing CoolSculpting.”
#side #effect #cosmetic #procedure #turn #fat #tumor
Image Source : nypost.com